Error: Missing required provider in next stage even after init - gitlab

Question

I have following CI configurations:
...
cache:
key: ${CI_PROJECT_NAME}
paths:
- ${TF_ROOT}/.terraform
before_script:
- echo -e "credentials \"$CI_SERVER_HOST\" {\n token = \"$CI_JOB_TOKEN\"\n}" > $TF_CLI_CONFIG_FILE
- cd ${TF_ROOT}
- export TF_LOG_CORE=TRACE
- export TF_LOG_PATH=terraform_logs.txt
stages:
- initialize
- validate
init:
stage: initialize
script:
- terraform -v
- terraform init
#- terraform validate
validate:
stage: validate
script:
- terraform validate
My init runs totally fine however i get following in the next stage i.e. validate:
$ terraform validate
╷
│ Error: Missing required provider
│
│ This configuration requires provider registry.terraform.io/datadog/datadog,
│ but that provider isn't available. You may be able to install it
│ automatically by running:
│ terraform init
in provider.tf:
terraform {
required_version = ">= 0.14"
required_providers {
datadog = {
source = "DataDog/datadog"
version = "2.24.0"
}
}
}
in config.toml:
concurrent = 1
check_interval = 0
[session_server]
session_timeout = 1800
[[runners]]
name = "some rummer"
url = "****
token = "***"
executor = "shell"
[runners.custom_build_dir]
[runners.cache]
[runners.cache.s3]
[runners.cache.gcs]
[runners.cache.azure]
If run the validate as subsequent command in the init stage itself if works fine, but just not in the different stage.
If i do ls -al in the next stage before validate, i can even see .terraform folder present which should be having providers inside?
Second guess was a caching issue, however I believe I have specified caches correctly - ${TF_ROOT}/.terraform?
I am running the gitlab-runner as shell executor.
Any idea what is wrong here?